The genre, as it stands, is showing you a picture and telling you to find a list of items in it, which are artfully concealed in said picture - and thus it is a *hidden object* adventure.

Now, most of the time the genre splits in two. We have the HOA games that have little or no pretence at a story; the game for the game's sake. Fishdom H2O from Playrix strikes me as being in that category (you're building an aquarium and you fund it by playing hidden object puzzles to raise funds for it), so the storyline is essentially irrelevant.

And then we have things like the aforementioned Mystery PI, that has a terribly weak storyline in an effort to justify what you're doing.

Now we have MumboJumbo and their HOA series. MumboJumbo bill themselves as 'premium casual games', so you can bet your bottom dollar they'll have a Bejeweled type game in their line up (7 Wonders), and somewhere in there, a HOA game.

Midnight Mysteries at least pretends to have a story, around which the gathering of objects is framed.

Playing the gameAnd once upon a midnight dreary, while you pondered, weak and weary... a raven turns up. Oh yes, we can see where this is going. The intro doesn't have a voice over, which would have been nice (but who do you get to open The Raven without fouling it up?)

The situation is that, as the intro shows, you're an author of some repute, having written a series entitled 'Forgotten Cases', covering 'Rebecca's Witching Hour in Old Salem' and 'Mayan Secrets'. You are, then, some type of archaeologist-cum-crime writer. And as the intro shows you, you're several years into a hiatus due to writer's block.

And it is while you are pondering many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore (the game takes some pains to show you the various books that you've written!), suddenly there came a tapping, a tapping at the chamber door.

Actually that's not what happens. A raven flies in and sits upon the clock in the corner and tells you to set it free... opening the door to the balcony.

Although you're viewing the study at this point, where there's books and books, and a deer or something over the fireplace, the only thing you can do is click on the balcony door and if you persist in not clicking on it, the game will flash the door and hint that that's really what you should be doing. Whereupon you are greeted with this happy chap.

"Help me, and I'll help you.Find my trunk, find my key.Solve the mystery, set me free.My powers to appear are limited, but I can always help you through my raven."

Oh, great, an Edgar Allan Poe story featuring a dead Edgar Allan Poe and a slight twinge of horror in the manner for which he was famous.

After a slightly odd screen where you're given an invitation to Westminster Hall, Baltimore, Maryland (and where you enter your name), you're taken to what purports to be Poe's grave.

So yeah, solve the ghost of Poe's puzzle and it'll fix your writer's block, naturally. And the mystery, of course, is that Poe was murdered. (The circumstances of his death are certainly unusual, and would not be out of place from one of his own stories.)

And already you can see this is absolutely traditional fare for a hidden object adventure game.

So now we're off finding the absolutely standard list of items that may or may not relate to what we're doing.

I don't know what the button pin or the sign were about, but the invitation envelope on the floor told me something.

The birthday treat - the cake - is a clue. The invitation was for a birthday today.

And of course, finishing the list of 8 shows us another list of things to find - because we only found 8 out of 21 items.

So, so far, it's fairly typical. The artwork is up to the typical standard of the genre, the clues not particularly awkward - but already we're seeing signs of 'being cryptic', for example 'presses clothing' is a small iron.

And then we discover what the 'tools' thing is for; we have to find an object listed in blue, entitled 'Dates' but items in blue require doing something to make them visible - in this case, we need to use one of the Tools we found, a scrubbing brush.

It's an interesting variation on the standard HOA mentality, but not a drastic one. It just means we've got to select an item and then play hidden-object again, with the item in mind as a tool. Of course here we're using the scrubbing brush on the dates on the grave, under the picture of Poe.

And sure enough, it's revealed that Poe was 'Murdered: October 7, 1849' and 'maybe Poe wants me to solve his murder'. Really? It's only just now dawned that that might be the plot?

If you remember my comments from Mystery PI, you may also wonder what I've made of the clickable areas; the clues are not so unusual as that game, and the area you can click on to register an item that you've found seems to be slightly more generous than in that game - but about typical for the HOA genre as a whole. Not overly generous, but not too strict either. Just enough to stop you randomly clicking around the screen.

On that note, I want to mention the help you'll get from the raven in the corner. You can always call for one thing: you can click on any item in the list of things to find, and you will get its silhouette in the lit jar.

More importantly, you will get its silhouette in the same orientation as it is on the page, which is a major free hint for any object you need to find. It means that most of the debate over exactly what you're supposed to be looking for is actually gone.

And if you have collected any ravens as you've gone along, you can ask the raven for more help by clicking on an object in the list at the bottom, then clicking on the raven and it'll fly across the screen and show you exactly where it is.

Having solved this puzzle, we get a little Journal button flash up, reminding us of the story thus far.

And so we move on to the next part of the story, the door to a cemetery. This is when things turn... Gothic, I guess. Everything shakes and the head falls off one of the statues and eyes glow warning you against interfering. I kid you not.

Cue another round of collecting a bunch of objects, most of which you won't need or use, and a couple that you actually will, specifically a piece of paper and some rubbing sticks to make rubbings of some of the emblems on gravestones.

You see, that locked door ahead is where we must go but it requires we figure out the door combination... and apparently to do this we must go around the graveyard, rubbing the icons onto a piece of paper to get the combination. How you mysteriously know where to rub the things on the paper is of course irrelevant.

Then we use that to open the door, noting that the paper has mysteriously rotated 90 degrees in the process (but not the pictures on it)... yeah.

I left the game there as it was late, but I think I got the handle on this.

On that bombshellThis game was never going to change my perception of the hidden object adventure. MumboJumbo is, after all, in much the same boat as PopCap and PlayRix, turning out polished implementations, sometimes with a twist, on established game styles, and this is no exception to that.

Midnight Mysteries is polished, and they have spent time trying to solve the typical objections to the HOA genre, namely the dichotomy between the clues and the objects, by using the raven's 'silhouette hint' option. And, unlike some of the other mainstays of the genre, they've tried to put a storyline in there too, and it comes across better than other games; at least you find *some* use for some of the items you find, as opposed to just collecting a bunch of objects for no readily apparent reason.

I like the style of the game, and I like the approach it has to provide something akin to a storyline which means I'm actually more likely to approach this game again to finish it, rather than drudging through screen after screen of items.

Getting the game, you can find it on Steam, $10 for one game, $30 for the series, or $80 for the entire MumboJumbo collection (which is what I did a bit back)... there are other places that you can obtain the game, for similar sorts of prices. Like most of these such games, though, you can play a free demo from one of the many places that stocks it, e.g. Big Fish Games' online demo

Some of the Midnight Mysteries series are also out for iOS but I couldn't find this game out for it, presumably only their later games are out.

Bottom line: if you like HOA games, this is one of the better of its kind - even if it isn't as difficult as its peers. If you don't like HOA games, there is nothing here to change your mind, but if you're on the fence, this isn't a bad game to play for a bit, it's just a little bit pricey.

There is a game or two from big fish on iOS that is much the same so one of their other farms might have developed the port and renamed it. Not a huge fan of HOA games however on touch enabled devices they are not as mind numbing because you are more likely to need to kill ten minutes on a mobile device.